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Share this Story: 'I was a broken person': The long, hard journey of whistleblower Joanna Gualtieri

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In her younger days, Joanna Gualtieri was all but unstoppable. A high achiever in school, she was extraordinarily active physically. “It was nothing for me to jump on a bike and ride 30 miles,” she says.

At age 11, she completed Ottawa’s Miles for Millions, a marathon 40-mile walk during the 1960s and 70s that raised money to alleviate Third World hunger and poverty. As a child, she travelled to India with her activist parents, living in a Volkswagen camper van for 18 months. At 20, she bought and renovated her first house.

'I was a broken person': The long, hard journey of whistleblower Joanna GualtieriBack to video

“I had so much energy — just a girl on fire,” Gualtieri, now 55, wistfully recalls during a lengthy, often emotional interview at her imposing home on Echo Drive, freshly built by her carpenter husband, Serge Landry. “That’s what made the deterioration so difficult. I knew that there was a better way.”

Gualtieri made headlines in 1998 when she and colleague John Guenette filed a lawsuit alleging they had been emotionally abused and ostracized by their employer, the Department of Foreign Affairs, for blowing the whistle on at least $2 billion of overspending on diplomatic facilities abroad.

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But her “deterioration” began well before the public ever heard her name. Almost from the beginning of her employment at Foreign Affairs in 1992, her mental and physical health was under assault, she says.

As the years passed, she went days without sleeping, was diagnosed with depression and PTSD, and had one viral illness after another. Her once impressive physical strength ebbed to near zero. “My doctor said, ‘Joanna, you can barely wipe your bum.’

“She saw a vibrant, happy, vivacious young woman become a shadow of herself,” Gualtieri says. Her doctor told her, “You have to get out. You are going to die.” Finally, after six turbulent years with Foreign Affairs, she took what became a permanent unpaid leave.

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“I stayed in a very toxic environment for way too long, and it had some very profound consequences,” Gualtieri says, her voice quavering. “It was one of the biggest mistakes I made, to continue to be a true believer and to trust and hope that I could make a difference.”

After filing the lawsuit, she soon learned how debilitating it is to challenge formidable power. “I cannot overstate the element of sheer and utter exhaustion that defined my existence,” she says.

Joanna Gualtieri says the battle she was thrust into took years from her life.Jean Levac/Postmedia News

Her life was devoid of routine pleasures — dining out, going to a movie, gathering with friends. Many days she didn’t even dress, remaining in her pyjamas as she pored over legal documents. Formerly an avid cook, she went months without cooking at all. Her house was untidy and chaotic.

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“As time went on, it became a very lonely, hard journey. Life became very small,” she says through tears. “I was a broken person.”

Broken as she was, she didn’t give up her fight. “My doctor said, ‘You are the highest-functioning depressive person I have ever seen.’ And he was right. … I was fighting for my life, in a way. When I finished what I had to do, I would just go into an all-out collapse.”

The stresses endured by whistleblowers often fracture relationships, but Gualtieri had unwavering support from her husband, Serge. The couple had been together for more than a decade, but married in 1999 because Gualtieri wanted to have children. “I am a traditionalist in that regard,” she says.

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She was nearing 40 at the time, her biological window starting to close, but had been so focused on her battle that she was oblivious to that fact until her doctor pointed it out. Thank God he did, she says. “The greatest damage out of this would have been that I found myself with that door shut.”

Gualtieri lost her first baby to miscarriage, but gave birth to a son, Zacharie, in 2003. “I never realized until recently that he was a miracle baby,” she says. “To get pregnant when you’re under that extraordinary stress and your life is in the kind of vice that mine was in is really quite something.” Two years later, when she was 44, her second son, Sebastien, was born.

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She couldn’t have raised a family without Serge, she says. “Child-rearing is a formidable job. I have a husband who is extraordinary in that regard. He was utterly devoted to these boys.”

Life revolved around her legal case and FAIR, the whistleblower organization she founded in 1998. “It was another thing that locked me into a lot of work and took away from my ability to have any life balance.”

Today, Gualtieri looks back with sadness that she wasn’t more available to her sons, now 13 and 11, when they were young. “I wish I could have experienced motherhood more with them, because you only have a shot at that once, and it’s gone now. It’s just another loss in a list of many.”

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There were other painful losses, as well. Her younger brother died tragically. Her mother died of cancer.

“When she was dying,” Gualtieri recalls with emotion, “I remember her saying to me how much she hoped that her beloved, capable daughter would find something to utilize her talents in a way that lifted her up rather than consigning her to a very hard life. She knew what I was doing was important. But she saw the toll it took.”

Yet she calls herself “perhaps one of the most blessed whistleblowers ever. I had a husband who asked for nothing, but just gave unconditional love. I have children that are so loving and so committed to me. So you can say I’m one of the fortunate ones.”

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But that only underlines how difficult it is for whistleblowers who don’t have her advantages. “They’re kicked to the sidelines before they’re out of the gate.”

Six years after settling her legal case, Gualtieri is still struggling with the impact of her epic battle. She’s had time to reflect, and reflection can be a very dangerous thing, she says.

“I reflected on the fact that my brother had died and I had not been there for him. My mother was diagnosed with cancer during my battles. I wish instead of reviewing legal documents I had been there to give love to my mother.”

She now understands that people can’t go through a prolonged trauma and come out feeling whole. “You have to find wholeness again.”

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For Gualtieri, working to expand public understanding and support for whistleblowers is part of that quest for wholeness.

She’s currently working on a FAIR project called The Integrity Principle, which focuses on the value of empowering truth in the workplace to inspire and foster trust. Its goal is to realign employees and management as players on the same team. “Healthy and productive workplaces require the freedom to speak openly and truthfully within the workplace, which inspires an environment of trust and mutual dignity,” Gualtieri says.

She’s optimistic she can use her hard-won wisdom to help pull that off. If she can, she says, her past hardships would cease to be hardships and instead become steps toward a better, brighter future.

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